Parents Beware!
Written by Dr. Susan Mashburn
In competition for the American Dream, you have ventured off-course regarding the college application process. While select educational institutions boast about their numbers, your children suffer rejection at the expense of elitism. And the mania will continue unless you shift your perspective and stop it.
On March 29, 2019, The New York Times boldly prints the message: “The nation’s most selective universities trumpeted the news that they had record numbers of applicants — and record low admission rates.”
Mashburn Education Group, a college counseling practice, takes issue with the arrogance of universities “trumpeting” their selectivity while myriad qualified students suffer sincere disappointments with their rejection notices. What makes this information even more disturbing is the recent cheating scandal perpetuated by unethical parents and professionals who have bought into a belief system of elitism—winners at the expense of losers—as if the remaining 4000 plus four-year colleges and universities in the United States deliver substandard academic programs.
As first-tier advocates for their children, parents need to provide a sense of security for their students who anticipate moving away from home to a college campus; instead many well-meaning yet off-thinking parents foster an often impossible reality for select colleges. Just when students need affirmation, they are getting angst from their parents and rejections from First Choice University. Frank Bruni warned everyone in 2015 of the devastation caused by college admissions “mania” in his book Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be. Yet today, the “mania” expands and flounders—fraught with cheating scandals and void of ethical checks and balances. Mashburn Education Group strives to help parents and students reframe herd mentality that can ruin a student’s last year at home and beyond, reinforcing a myth that excludes learning for learning’s sake without a moral compass. To circumvent such a system, we find that focus on skill development diminishes the stress of test prep, and narrative admissions essays can be quite therapeutic when developing an authentic voice. We hope everything we do to assist students with the college admissions process contributes to learning and improved self-awareness—where collaboration rather than mere competition informs a meaningful transition from childhood to adulthood.
So, an important question for parents and professionals to ask is the following: What can we do to positively accompany our young people over the threshold of their next educational passage? The answer must include ethical stances and enlightened awareness of all appropriate university options for the quest.